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As the press secretary for a president who's obsessed with how things play on cable TV, Sean Spicer’s real audience during his daily televised press briefings has always been an audience of one.
And the devastating “Saturday Night Live” caricature of Spicer that aired over the weekend — in which a belligerent Spicer was spoofed by a gum-chomping, super soaker-wielding Melissa McCarthy in drag — did not go over well internally at a White House in which looks matter.
More than being lampooned as a press secretary who makes up facts, it was Spicer’s portrayal by a woman that was most problematic in the president’s eyes, according to sources close to him. And the unflattering send-up by a female comedian was not considered helpful for Spicer’s longevity in the grueling, high-profile job in which he has struggled to strike the right balance between representing an administration that considers the media the "opposition party," and developing a functional relationship with the press....
It’s not that often that a billboard is so absurd that it invites widespread mockery and goes viral in the process. But this one has—a full six years after it was made. The ad, from the Netherlands, was made by a Dutch agency called Etcetera for the Predictor pregnancy-test brand. With a quick glance, it’s clear something isn’t quite right. The man and woman seem extremely surprised by the reading on the pregnancy test....
But there is a third kind of humor that could ultimately do the most to deflate Trump. Last weekend, in an attempt to explain the new Administration’s insistence on lying about the size of the crowds at Trump’s Inauguration, Kellyanne Conway went on “Meet the Press” to explain that Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, had been offering “alternative facts.” Trump’s team knows the political power of a concise, catchy, and easily repeated phrase—and they must recognize, in “alternative facts,” a potential crack in the veneer of Trumpism. The phrase is not simply plainly ridiculous, it’s pathetically so. It’s the kind of thing that an aspiring strongman like Trump himself would never say—he just blusters, pretending, or maybe even believing, that the things he says are the real facts, the only facts. Instead, it’s what the semi-reasonable people who work for him have to come up with in order to serve two masters—Trump on the one hand and reality on the other. “He believes what he believes,” Spicer later said about his boss.
Gaslighting is a tactic of behavior in which a person or entity, in order to gain more power, makes a victim question their reality. It works a lot better than you may think. Anyone is susceptible to gaslighting. It is a common technique of abusers, dictators, narcissists, and cult leaders. It is done slowly, so the victim doesn't realize how much they've been brainwashed. In the movie Gaslight (1944), a man manipulates his wife to the point where she thinks she is losing her mind.
People that gaslight use the following techniques...
Employees from more than a dozen U.S. government agencies have established a network of unofficial "rogue" Twitter feeds in defiance of what they see as attempts by President Donald Trump to muzzle federal climate change research and other science.
Seizing on Trump's favorite mode of discourse, scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency, NASA and other bureaus have privately launched Twitter accounts - borrowing names and logos of their agencies - to protest restrictions they view as censorship and provide unfettered platforms for information the new administration has curtailed.... Employees at the EPA and the departments of Interior, Agriculture and Health and Human Services have since confirmed seeing notices from the new administration either instructing them to remove web pages or limit how they communicate to the public, including through social media.... Within hours, unofficial "resistance" or "rogue" Twitter accounts began sprouting up, emblazoned with the government logos of the agencies where they worked, the list growing to at least 14 such sites by Wednesday afternoon....
This drives journalists nuts. They feel a duty to rebut lies, and in the age of “John Oliver Destroys Something” headlines, there’s an appetite among liberal viewers for plucky correspondents eviscerating right-wing ideologues on-air. We’ve now seen one host after another—Todd, Cuomo, Anderson Cooper—lose his cool or waste a long interview trying to make Conway acknowledge elementary facts.
Of course, presidential flacks have always tried to stretch or shade the truth during on-air interviews. In his first briefings as press secretary to President George W. Bush, Ari Fleischer juggled contrary rationales for tax cuts, that the government could afford them or that a weak economy needed them, using whichever argument seemed to fit the evidence presented. In his first briefings as press secretary to President Obama,
Robert Gibbs used the term “financial stability package” to mask the stench of corporate bailouts. Reporters understood that no matter what they asked, Fleischer would defend tax cuts and Gibbs would defend bailouts. But the president’s spokesman would generally try to reconcile the president’s agenda with the facts. And if he couldn’t, he would at least clarify the agenda. Conway brings none of that. She alters unwelcome questions, disregards the facts presented to her, and clarifies nothing. In part, that’s because Trump has no organized agenda. All he has is ego. So that’s what she fights for. She’s not there to persuade a skittish Republican senator to repeal the Affordable Care Act. She’s there to defend and avenge one man’s wounded pride....
Today the New York Times rolled out the big guns in the battle for truth. There, in Jim Rutenberg’s latest Mediator column, were two digits the likes of which I have never seen in the Grey Lady. Footnotes, people. Honest-to-God footnotes. The footnotes were there to annotate a story about the Trump administration’s disregard for the truth: ‘Alternative Facts’ and the Costs of Trump-Branded Reality. By necessity, that story referenced two of the administration’s newly minuted “alternative facts”, a.k.a. lies. The first of these was the claim by Sean Spicer, the new press secretary, that more people had used DC’s Metro system the morning of Trump’s inauguration than had used it the morning of Obama’s 2013 inauguration. The second was the President’s accusation that tensions between Trump and the intelligence community were caused by the meddling media....
What does the public relations industry have to look forward to in 2017? What’s in store for practitioners, agencies and companies seeking to build awareness, reputation and trust? Three mega-trends are on their way and will arrive on our industry’s shores this year. Let’s see if we’re ready for them:...
What can this small chapter tell us about what’s to come? That Trump will be what columnist Frida Ghitis of the Miami Herald calls “the gaslighter in chief” — that he will pull out all the stops to make people think that they should believe him, not their own eyes. (“Gaslighting” is a reference to the 1940s movie in which a manipulative husband psychologically abuses his wife by denying the reality that the gaslights in their home are growing dimmer and dimmer.) “The techniques,” Ghitis wrote, “include saying and doing things and then denying it, blaming others for misunderstanding, disparaging their concerns as oversensitivity, claiming outrageous statements were jokes or misunderstandings, and other forms of twilighting the truth.”...
After 146 years, the curtain is coming down on “The Greatest Show on Earth.” The owner of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus told The Associated Press that the show will close forever in May. The iconic American spectacle was felled by a variety of factors, company executives say. Declining attendance combined with high operating costs, along with changing public tastes and prolonged battles with animal rights groups all contributed to its demise. “There isn’t any one thing,” said Kenneth Feld, chairman and CEO of Feld Entertainment. “This has been a very difficult decision for me and for the entire family.” The company broke the news to circus employees Saturday night after shows in Orlando and Miami....
The striking ads last just 10 seconds, but the spots are ruffling plenty of feathers.A new PR campaign from the Irish Cancer Societyfeatures short promos on TV and social media with the words: “I want to get cancer.” Each spot shows four different people—a middle-aged couple, a young surfer and a young woman in a relationship. Each person says: “I want to get cancer.”Is it too offensive or powerful PR?...
2016 saw its fair share of corporate public-relations mishaps, but some were more cringeworthy than others. To be sure, the PR crises in certain cases weren't all that bad compared with the serious business missteps that precipitated a few of them, but the fact remains that there is always a better and a worse way to talk to customers and the public when something's gone wrong. These were three of the year's most egregious gaffes, and what companies can learn from them heading into 2017
The Reuters Institute For The Study Of Journalism recently released a report showing that trust levels in news vary hugely by country. Trust is highest in affluent Western European nations, primarily due to the presence of well-funded public service broadcasters. 65 percent of people in Finland agreed that "you can trust most news most of the time". In the United States, the epicenter of the fake news storm, trust was far lower at just 33 percent. This chart shows the % agreeing "you can trust news most of the time" in selected countries.
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If you repeat a lie enough, it becomes the truth.”That quote has been attributed to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. I say attributed because even though there are many reports of him saying it, there is no public record that he actually did. In other words, it could be a lie that has become the truth simply because it was repeated enough times....
All modern American presidents have seen their disapproval rating surpass the 50 percent mark at some stage after taking office. Some reached that milestone faster than others but generally, it took all of them hundreds of days to do so. George Bush senior lasted an impressive 1,336 days before he hit 50 percent disapproval in Gallup's polls while Bill Clinton lasted 573 days before reaching majority disapproval. As a result of the federal debt crisis, Barack Obama passed the 50 percent mark 936 days into his presidency.
Donald Trump has reached majority disapproval in record time, just 8 days. When he entered office, an initial poll from Gallup showed that 45 percent of Americans approved of him, 45 disapproved and 10 percent were undecided. In his first week, he announced construction of the border wall, halted immigration from seven countries, gutted the Affordable Care Act and reversed U.S abortion policy, pushing his disapproval rating to 51 percent, according to a Gallup poll released on January 28....
A lot of former congressional staffers agree that the best way to make your voice heard is to call your representatives rather than emailing them. And a new website makes that easier than ever. 5 Calls streamlines the calling process to make it user friendly and convenient. Simply enter your zipcode at the top left and you’ll be given a personalized list of numbers to call about the most pressing issues of the day. Click through topics on the left hand column to access a brief overview of each issue, a script to use when placing the call, and an explanation of why you’re calling a particular office (i.e. it’s one of your Senators or the Army Corps of Engineers is conducting an environmental impact report on the Dakota Access Pipeline)....
What we’ve got here is [NOT] a failure to communicate” to slightly alter the famous line from the movie Cool Hand Luke. That line best describes public response to the Trump inauguration, the massive DC and national Women’s March, and the public and social media response to the first six days of the new administration. The Trump campaign and transition teams, and the new White House advisors all pride themselves on their social media savvy. Led by the newly sworn-in POTUS and Twitter-in-Chief, social media is now alive with the sound of truth, lies, statistics and “alternate facts.” And the new administration is scrambling to respond....
You can count the Department of Agriculture as the latest federal agency under attack from Donald Trump who is now actively rebelling against him. After Trump punished the National Park Service for tweeting about his inauguration crowd size, and the Badlands was forced to delete its tweets about climate change, these agencies have begun sticking it to Trump by rolling out secondary non-government Twitter accounts that he can’t control. Lo and behold, the unofficial USDA Twitter account.
The @AltUSDA account on Twitter has been in existence for less than a day but already has tens of thousands of followers, and it’s been posting helpful tweets along the lines of “Read the USDA Climate Change Solutions page while you still can” along with a link to an article on the usda.gov website which, for the moment at least, is still visible. It’s expected that the Trump administration will forcibly remove such information in order to pretend that climate change isn’t real. But @AltUSDA is going further....
Rose Dawydiak-Rapagnani, a San Francisco-based communications strategist, recently struck out on her own to start a consultancy. In the first months, she signed up a company that made a strong impression. But after she wrapped up the job and sent along an invoice, the client disappeared off the face of the map. She followed up with them four separate times, and eventually escalated to seeking legal counsel. "I still have not heard back from this person," she says. "It was a perfect storm of being too generous with my time and hoping for the best." Now, she is taking a more hard-line approach with clients by asking for some money down and discontinuing work if a payment is late. Dawydiak-Rapagnani is far from the only victim of this kind of practice, which some call "professional ghosting." "Ghosting" is a term that is most frequently used in the online dating world, and it involves a romantic prospect neglecting to respond to texts or calls after a few dates. Career experts say this practice is increasingly spilling over into the workplace, ranging from being fairly innocent—an overlooked email in a flooded inbox—to downright nefarious, such as avoiding paying consultants after they've completed their work....
Much of the world was united yesterday in solidarity as Women’s Marches took place all over the globe. The protest signs – and there were so many – spoke volumes.
Fast-forward to the waning months of 2016, and the magic is a little harder to feel. Certain corners of the social world have become uglier places, with some in the business world calling for a draw-down. But the pitfalls of political partisanship weren't the only things companies struggled to circumnavigate last year. From a more practical standpoint, it turned out that just having an audience on social media doesn’t mean you actually get to reach it.
And as we head into 2017, the fact that social media is paying ever fewer dividends to many brands and their marketers is becoming more apparent. So what comes next?...
It’s a tricky time to be a food marketer. Consumers are scrutinizing more than ever to what goes into the foods they buy. And what constitutes “healthy” to consumers is in flux. The FDA recently announced that it will be calling out “added sugar” on nutrition labels in the future. It is estimated that 68% of processed foods contain added sugars. “It’s going to really surprise people who go to organic and whole foods stores, when they find that all this natural food they’ve been buying is full of added sugar,” said Barry Popkin, UNC professor and author of a study called, “Sweetening of the Global Diet. ”I heard that there are 61 different names for added sugar listed on food labels, which can make it hard for consumers to evaluate the amount of sugar in products they buy. The sneakiest trick to to have multiple sources of added sugar in one product, so that no one type of sugar shows up first on the ingredients panel....
We’re only three weeks into the new year, but “fake news” could already be the phrase of the year. After reports suggested that fake news on Twitter and Facebook contributed to Donald Trump’s win in last year’s US Presidential election, the latter is finally clamping down on the issue. The company has announced new tools to curb fake news in Germany, presumably as a measure ahead of the country’s August 2017 elections. “Last month we announced some tests to address the issue of fake news on Facebook,” Aine Kerr, the company’s manager of journalism partnerships, wrote in a press release....
Congratulations, US media! You’ve just covered your first press conference of an authoritarian leader with a deep disdain for your trade. Here are some tips from Russia.Vladimir Putin’s annual pressers are supposed to be the media event of the year. They are normally held in late December, around Western Christmas time (we Orthodox Christians celebrate Christmas two weeks later and it’s not a big deal, unlike New Year’s Eve). Which probably explains why Putin’s pressers don’t get much coverage outside of Russia, except in a relatively narrow niche of Russia-watchers. Putin’s pressers are televised live across all Russian TV channels, attended by all kinds of media — federal news agencies, small local publications and foreign reporters based in Moscow — and are supposed to overshadow every other event in Russia or abroad. These things are carefully choreographed, typically last no less than four hours, and Putin always comes off as an omniscient and benevolent leader tending to a flock of unruly but adoring children. Given that Putin is probably a role model for Trump, it’s no surprise that he’s apparently taking a page from Putin’s playbook. I have some observations to share with my American colleagues. You’re in this for at least another four years, and you’ll be dealing with things Russian journalists have endured for almost two decades now. I’m talking about Putin here, but see if you can apply any of the below to your own leader....
When it comes to business blogging, how much time do people put into creating posts? How long are their articles? What goes into them? How often do they publish new content? How do they promote their posts? Do they measure the results? The answers to any and all of the questions deliver interesting insights on the state of digital marketing. And thanks to the work of Orbit Media Studios, this data has been collected, made available and fun to consume. For three years running, Andy Crestodina -- the web design and development company's co-founder -- and his team have surveyed 1000+ bloggers about how they create content and compiled their findings into blog posts, infographics, and SlideShares. Let's take a look at some of the trends over the years ......
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No political opposition bigger than humor.